WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Exciting day at the dog track!

The Way We Live Now

Booming business.

GOODLETTSVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Discount retailer Dollar General says it will add 5,000 jobs as it opens 600 new stores over the next 12 months.

Afternoon Thread

enjoy

Not Over

This is from a few weeks ago, but the graph should scare you. Basically, as I've been shouting for some time now, there's still a ticking time bomb waiting to blow up as Option ARMs recast. Interest rates are still low, so the issue isn't resetting rates, the issue is when people can no longer make interest-only or neg-am payments on their mortgages, making them unaffordable.

Austerity

It's always the solution.

ATHENS, Feb 4 (Reuters) - Greek tax officials walked off the job on Thursday, kicking off a series of strikes against an austerity plan meant to pull the country out of a debt crisis that has sent shockwaves across the euro zone.

The plan, which won the European Commission's qualified backing on Wednesday, includes a wage freeze across the public sector and cuts in special allowances that make up a big chunk of civil servants' overall income.

Feisty

Cuomo files civil fraud charges against BoA, Ken Lewis, and Joe Price.(.pdf)

Message: Focused On Jobs

As Meyerson suggests, it's depressing that the Dems can confront this reality, and instead of doing what's necessary to preserve and create jobs they're going to... do not much at all.

There are things they can do.

Thursday Is New Jobless Day

Surprise, it still isn't getting better.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased 8,000 to a seasonally adjusted 480,000 in the week ended Jan. 30, the Labor Department said on Thursday. That was above market expectations for 460,000.

Monthly jobs report comes out tomorrow. I'm hoping for a bad number (not bad reality, bad measurement), because it's probably the last chance for something to spur the powers that be into doing something...

Research

So the US is gonna study torture techniques to evaluate their effectiveness.

An elite US interrogation unit will conduct "scientific research" to find better ways of questioning top suspected terrorists, US intelligence director Dennis Blair said Wednesday.

AFP

Update. Now I am a bad blogger. The article also says

Blair said the HIG charter required it to abide by the US Army Field Manual, which forbids abusive interrogation techniques.

Thanks to RMJ in comments for pulling this out. Personally, I find this untrustworthy. The FBI has already studied this. Effective interrogation techniques have been in place for some time.

Morning Thread

Even More Gypsy Shit

Blog: Now With More Gypsy Shit

Bidness

I don't think this is really the right interpretation. A lot of businesses really are over regulated, and a lot of people have owned, worked for, or known someone who involved with one of these businesses.

Maybe over regulated is the wrong phrase as I'm not really passing judgment on the soundness of the regulations. It's just that people who run truly small businesses can deal with a lot of headaches with their local municipalities, and because they're genuinely small businesses they don't really have the staff to deal with it.

One of the poll questions explicitly mentions the federal government, but I don't think people distinguish that much.

We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!

I gather Rove was on O'Reilly's fainting couch, upset at all the profanity over at the great orange satan's place.

This Post Will Probably Bore You

My local transit authority is making a fairly major change to its regional rail system. Without boring you with all the history, roughly speaking, a few decades ago they connected up the two "sides" of the system. Part of the motivation was so that they could create more suburb-to-suburb routes, with each line going inbound into the city from one outer suburb, and then back out to another outer suburb. Whatever the merits of this idea, in recent years changing train routing needs have meant that a lot of trains aren't actually one seat rides from one outer suburb to another, and the trains change their route designations when they hit the city.

So they're going back to a pure hub and spoke system now. I'm not entirely sure why train routing needs required a lot of trains to change rout designations, but presumably this does provide for some additional flexibility in changing train frequencies. For example, it might make it easier to run relatively more outbound trains at night, or perhaps have more trains which only travel a truncated route, providing greater frequencies over shorter segments.

All very exciting!!

Happy Hour Thread

enjoy

Groceries

This is good policy from the Obama administration. While I'm dubious about many private business subsidies from local governments, I've written many times that I definitely support making efforts to attract food markets to areas that don't have them. They really make the difference between a viable and nonviable neighborhoods, and can be the catalyst to help struggling neighborhoods come back to life.

Those Menacing Bloggers

I guess what happened is someone finally clued Evan Bayh in on the fact that there are people on the internets who say mean things about him, and that, after Joe Lieberman, he's our favorite chew toy these days. Must be getting under his skin if he's using high profile time to complain about liberal blogs to the president.

Senators is weird.

Threaded

Let's see if this works..


...thanks to reader r for the tech support. Hopefully this will keep working...

Echo Seems To Be Busted

for the moment.

You can try this link for the current thread